PowerDialer Adds Social, Gamification to Boost Sales

Phone sales on the Salesforce platform enters the social enterprise era with new offerings from InsideSales.com.

This week during Dreamforce, a gathering of Salesforce.com developers, partners and customers, InsideSales.com is showing off technology that lets small sales teams pounce on leads like a well-oiled, social-savvy corporate sales organization.

The company this week unveiled new features that add social integration, a dash of productivity-enhancing gamification and SMS text support to the company's cloud-based PowerDialer for Salesforce 5.0 product. PowerDialer provides sales-centric phone functionality, like rapid response to information requests, using Salesforce.com customer relationship management platform.

While PowerDialer does "accelerate the number of calls you can make," InsideSales.com provides tools for professional phone sales, says president and co-founder Ken Krogue. It's not telemarketing like the name PowerDialer can imply. The product enables some automation to promote efficiency, but not in the traditional robo-dialer sense.

PowerDialer calls can involve contacting new leads, setting meeting schedules or communicating appointment updates -- any and all steps involved in closing a deal. A top-ranked app on Salesforce App Exchange, the software also offers management visibility, says Krogue, a sought-after capability that gives sales managers a metrics-driven grasp on the performance of their teams.

Social Sales and Friendly Competition

New PowerSocial social media integration -- namely LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook -- adds to this visibility with logging and reporting social interactions on the Salesforce reporting tool. It also opens up another communication medium to engage with prospects for sales representatives, in addition to phone and email.

According to InsideSales.com, the new social hooks can pay off in a big way for sales organizations. "LinkedIn has reported its InMail Premium Service out-pulls traditional email 33 to 1," says the company.

PowerStandings adds some friendly competition to day-to-day sales activities. The gamification platform uses challenges, goals, badges, rewards, and a "standings bar" to stimulate the competitive nature of sales staffers, which in turn can lead to higher sales as they climb the leaderboard. A social media-based "trash talk" awards points for some good-natured ribbing and as encouragement to meet goals.

Lastly, the company is rolling out PowerText SMS. An alternative to phone or email, the technology is meant to communicate short and sweet messages like scheduling changes for both prospects and sales reps or for follow-ups to a meeting. Krogue stresses that PowerText SMS works best as a "light touch" solution that helps sales teams and potential clients connect when circumstances favor -- or communications preferences dictate -- the use of SMS.

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